Christmas shopping underway in Oxford Street, news of scummy days out from Surrey to pay homage at Raoul Moat's funeral, people still thrusting free newspapers in your face as you walk around London.
All of these seemed reasonable cause for annoyance during a trip back to London.
But what got me more cross than anything was a string of examples of the inconsistent sentencing practices of Her Majesty's judiciary. Memo to self: must ask my pal the judge what goes on in the minds of his confreres when they:
* jail Raymond Scott for eight years for a handling a stolen book - albeit the cultural treasure that is Shakespeare's First Folio - in the same court, and on the same day, that a killer receives six years for manslaughter
* decide that 12 months in jail is quite sufficient for a millionaire who endangers life by jumping up and down trying to impede the departure of a helicopter that had blown dust over his 4X4
* consider 18 months an adequate penalty for a "single blow" during a row that turned a husband into his wife's killer?
I know that all sorts of circumstances have to be taken into account, and also that media reports of court cases are necessarily no more than summaries.
But I long to know how handling stolen property worth £100,000 or more can attract a minimum of four years in jail (if the BBC analysis is to be trusted), and lead - because of the significance of the book concerned, and also the offender's long record as a thieving pest - to the equivalent, in this case, of a drug smuggler's sentence or five times the rate for killing your wife.
In the cases of the two manslaughter convictions mentioned, there was criminal intent, however minor by comparison with the consequences. Yet people with unblemished records now go automatically to jail for relatively long periods for causing the deaths of others on the road, when no criminal intent is involved and there is not even an aggravating factor such as drink, drugs, speed or aggression.
Perhaps instead of asking my friend, I should invite Judge Richard Lowden, whose treatment of the man in the book case would not have been out of place in an American court of the kind we criticise so often, to explain why we should express no surprise when crimes of property are seen as so much more grave than crimes against the person.
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